Photo by Doni Greenberg

Sometimes I just don’t know when to leave well enough alone.

Take my pear dumplings, for example. Please.

They were adaptations of a perfectly lovely Apple Dumpling recipe from a Napa cooking class I attended at Copia: American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts (surely a name chosen by committee).

The Copia apple dumpling recipe (yes, I’ll post it, too) was a wonderful little number, stuffed with a fruit-and-nut mixture, wrapped in pastry, floated in a cinnamon sauce and topped with creme anglaise. What’s not to love about that?

Nothing.

Much.

Except I couldn’t leave it alone. So I experimented on some friends who came over for dinner recently by swapping the apples for pears. Instead of making the pastry, I used thawed, store-bought packaged puff pastry. Then I skipped the creme anglaise because I ran out of time. Ditto with the cinnamon-sauce moat.

But nobody complained when those beautiful pears, clothed in browned, flaky puff pastry, were served with a dollop of whipped cream, and the topper, my Caramel Whiskey Sauce. As an aside, that Caramel Whiskey Sauce is one of my best creations, if I do say so myself. It’s so good that I really should stop typing this very minute and see about bottling, marketing and selling the stuff. (And yes, I’ll post that recipe, too.)

Everyone raved about my Pear Dumplings with Caramel Whiskey Sauce.

But I couldn’t stop there. I came across a recipe for pears poached in red wine, with a photo of a gorgeously translucent pear, alone on a plate. But it looked a little - uh - lacking.

Behold, my idea for the Poached Pear Dumpling was born. My conception had the pear poached in amaretto instead of wine. And I’d stuff it with dried fruits. And I’d top it with my Caramel Whiskey Sauce.

And I’d make it for Thanksgiving dessert.

I started with the most adorable sack of Anjou pears that I bought at the Grocery Outlet in Redding. (I should be on commission with the Grocery Outlet, and Cash and Carry, for that matter, too.)

I poached the peeled, cored pears in a syrupy mixture of apple juice, amaretto, sugar and a cinnamon stick. I towel dried them, then let them air dry for a couple of hours. Those pears were so pretty.

Then I stuffed them (from the bottom, so I could retain their cute stems) and wrapped each pear in a puff pastry jacket, topped with a dough-leaf hat. I brushed them with an egg wash for shine, and popped them in the oven.

I was alarmed when I peeked in the oven about 20 minutes later. The pears had shed their puff pastry outerwear into a disc beneath them that resembled a child’s ceramic’s class ashtray, or a discarded knee-high stocking, or something found on a circus floor after the elephant show.

In some places, the puff pastry clung stubbornly to the pears’ bodies in bits and pieces, which looked a little like peeling skin after a bad sunburn.

I immediately knew what had happened. While baking, the poached pears released their inner moisture to the outer pastry, causing it to let go and slide down.

That’s why, when my guests arrived, I was rolling out pie crust, cutting it in circles, wrapping each pear (now much drier, thanks to their earlier baking), brushing them with egg wash and putting them in the oven.

The pears turned out delicious. Especially with seconds, thirds, and fourths on the Caramel Whiskey Sauce.

70 views